The Stingray Office is the free-lance business of Jeffrey J. Dean. Established in Oxford in 1989, The Stingray Office has been located in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, since 1994. The name comes from the whimsical notion, current from antiquity into early-modern times, that ‘the stingray enjoys music, dancing, and jokes’, and pays homage to our origins in musical scholarship.

The Stingray Office offers publishers the services of copy-editing, design, typesetting, music origination, illustration management, and type design. We specialize in integrated packages combining these services, and our particular forte is problem solving. We are valued by publishers for our ability to achieve prompt and superior solutions to unusual requirements, and for our meticulous attention to detail. We strive to keep abreast of new developments in the publishing industry; at present we are developing the capacity for XML-based workflows. Most of our work has been for academic publishers (where we have special advantages, owing to Dr Dean’s academic background), but we are also interested in working for trade publishers.

Jeffrey Dean is a musicologist with an international reputation. Born and educated in the United States, he taught at the University of California, both Berkeley and Los Angeles, before moving to England in 1989 and changing career. He has maintained an active presence in the field, however, including part-time teaching at the Universities of Southampton and Manchester, as well as pursuing research and writing whenever he can spare the time from publishing work. He specializes in the history of Western music; his research is focused on the theory and practice of music in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially sacred music in the period 1450–1550, but he has taught subjects embracing all periods from ancient Mesopotamia to the late twentieth century. He is available for lectures and seminars.

Dr Dean is a print designer, not a web designer, so this site has been designed to be simple, clear, and attractive rather than impressive. The same principle (based on Beatrice Warde’s famous idea of the ‘crystal goblet’) informs our print design. This site has been a long time in gestation — The Stingray Office has been connected to the Internet since its inception in 1989, and we have owned the eponymous domains stingrayoffice.com and stingrayoffice.co.uk since 2002, but the site has only been built in 2007 — and it is still under construction. Coming attractions (which we hope to be able to introduce before too long) include: introductory pages to our ‘Publishing’ and ‘Scholarship’ sections; a gallery of book and journal designs; a gallery of type designs, with the facility to purchase fonts on-line; an FTP folder to enable two-way transfer of large files. Suggestions for further improvements (or comments on the present contents) are welcome.